Razer Blade Stealth review: What happens when gamers make a regular laptop?

Without a GPU, it's just a competent Ultrabook with mediocre battery life.

The Razer Blade Stealth, Razer's first computer that isn't exclusively targeted at gamers.

Andrew Cunningham

The Chroma keyboard, which lights each key with an individual LED, is definitely the Blade Stealth's most interesting feature.

Andrew Cunningham

Keys can be lit differently for practical or superficial reasons.

Andrew Cunningham

Or you can just make it work like a normal backlight if you want (green isn't the only color available, of course).

Andrew Cunningham

The lit green logo on the back is the most ostentatious part of an otherwise understated design.

Andrew Cunningham

Left side: Thunderbolt 3 and USB Type A. The Thunderbolt port can be used for USB Type-C accessories and display output if you want.

Andrew Cunningham

Right side: USB, HDMI.

Andrew Cunningham

The USB Type-C power brick that comes with the Blade Stealth is actually pretty nice—it’s a small rectangular tube, and the cord running from the brick to the laptop is made of a tightly-knit fabric rather than the standard plastic, which seems like it ought to be less prone to breaking and fraying.

Andrew Cunningham

The Razer Core external GPU enclosure is one of the Blade Stealth's main selling points, but it isn't available yet. For now, we'll evaluate the Blade Stealth on its own merits.

Up until now, all of those PCs focused on gaming. You could use them all for general productivity tasks, but if you didn’t plan to play games there were other, better, cheaper options readily available. The Razer Blade Stealth, on the other hand, is positioned to compete directly with regular Ultrabooks from Dell, HP, and other more pedestrian PC makers. Razer still had gaming in mind when it designed the Blade Stealth—a separate Thunderbolt dock can house a dedicated desktop GPU that you connect to the laptop with a Thunderbolt cable—but that accessory is optional and isn’t due out for another month or two.

In fact, the company asked that we evaluate the Blade Stealth primarily as an Ultrabook and not as a gaming laptop, partly because it’s targeting a wider market and partly because its integrated GPU won’t stand up to laptops with dedicated graphics chips. As a laptop for a more general audience, the Blade Stealth has its good points, but the comparison to heavy hitters like Dell’s XPS 13 isn’t always flattering.

Look and Feel

Specs at a glance: Razer Blade Stealth

Screen

3840×2160 at 12.5" (352 PPI)

OS

Windows 10 x64

CPU

2.6GHz dual-core Intel Core i7-6500U (Turbo up to 3.1GHz)

RAM

8GB 1866MHz LPDDR3 (non-upgradeable)

GPU

Intel HD 520 (integrated)

HDD

256GB PCIe solid-state drive

Networking

867Mbps 802.11a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.1

Ports

2x USB 3.0, HDMI, Thunderbolt 3, headphones

Size

12.6" × 8.1" × 0.52" (321mm × 206mm × 13.1mm)

Weight

2.75 lbs (1.25 kg)

Battery

45Whr

Warranty

1 year

Starting price

$999

Price as reviewed

$1,399

Other perks

Webcam

General audience or not, the Blade Stealth is true to Razer’s established aesthetic. The entire laptop is made of jet-black aluminim, and the only distinguishing mark is the glowing green snakey Razer logo on the lid. For me, this is the biggest downside of a laptop from Razer, Alienware, or pretty much any company designing things with stereotypical “gamers” in mind: glowing, “edgy” logos and multicolored LEDs are essentially unavoidable. You can turn the logo’s light off in the software settings, though this makes it only marginally less ostentatious.

Otherwise I generally like the design of the Blade Stealth, which is slick and smooth and (logo aside) understated. Its profile is thin and slightly tapered, in the vein of all modern post-MacBook-Air Ultrabooks. The black matte aluminum is sturdy and doesn’t feel cheap, though aluminum laptops like MacBooks, the XPS 13, and the Asus Zenbook UX305 flex a little less in the lid and body. The finish does get fingerprint-y very quickly, though. The lid and palmrest seem specifically engineered to pick up oil from your fingers and palms, and I can only imagine what it will look like after a year of use.

The Razer Blade Stealth’s largish bezel makes it bigger than the XPS 13, which remains unique among 13-inch laptops for its relatively small size. Even compared to the Zenbook’s bezels, the Blade Stealth’s are big. It’s most directly comparable to the 13-inch MacBook Air, which the Blade Stealth is roughly as wide as, though the smaller palmrest makes Razer’s laptop about an inch shorter than Apple’s.

The port selection could also be better. You get one USB 3.0 port on each side, a full-size HDMI port on the right, and a Thunderbolt 3 port on the left. The Thunderbolt port can also be used with USB Type-C accessories and serves as the laptop’s charging port. There’s no SD card slot, and there’s no dedicated DisplayPort output for 60Hz 4K output. The laptop can put out a DisplayPort signal over its USB Type-C port, but unless you have a USB Type-C display that can pass power to the laptop, you can't drive the monitor and charge the laptop at the same time. Stuff like this will become less of a big deal as USB Type-C accessories and peripherals become more common.

The screen itself is a high point. Razer sent us the high-end model with a 12.5-inch 4K IPS touchscreen, and everything about it—the color, the brightness, the viewing angles, the sharpness—is impressive. Many Ultrabook makers ship 1080p screens on 13-inch laptops by default and offer 2560×1440 or 3200×1800 screens as upgrade options, but the Blade Stealth includes a 1440p screen as the base option and 4K as the upgrade. It’s not the first 4K Ultrabook, but it’s definitely one of the first. The main downside, functionally, is that there’s no auto-brightness sensor, which may slightly reduce battery life in real-world usage if you aren’t carefully managing your display’s brightness.

The move from a 1440p screen to a 4K screen in a 4K laptop is questionable, as it may affect the user experience negatively in some instances. Use Windows 10’s Task View on the Blade Stealth, and you can easily see choppy animations that mean the integrated GPU is struggling. Higher-resolution screens usually have a deleterious effect on battery life, as we’ll examine later. It’s a lot like the move from 1080p to 1440p in 5- and 6-inch smartphones: you’re stressing your hardware more in exchange for diminishing returns in actual visible display quality.

Keyboard, trackpad, and speakers

The Blade Stealth has a full-size chiclet keyboard and a large multitouch trackpad, de rigueur for Ultrabooks these days.

The feel of the keyboard is OK but not great. Travel is shallow compared to the XPS 13, the Zenbook, or Apple’s MacBook Air and Pro keyboards, but they lack the stiffness and clickiness that the Retina MacBook leans on to compensate for the same problems. I typed on it as quickly as I type on any keyboard, but it’s not as satisfying as other laptops in its price class.

The keyboard’s Chroma backlight is almost enough to make up for its mediocre feel. It's a unique feature that helps the Blade Stealth stand out from the crowd, something it otherwise has trouble doing. It’s backlit, yes, but instead of using a single-color, entirely-on-or-entirely-off backlight, every single key is lit with an individual multicolor LED. The benefits are partly aesthetic and partly functional; the included Razer Synapse software (which you have to sign in to use, unfortunately) lets you light different keys with different colors, which you can use to make certain keys stand out from others. Press the function key, and every other light on the keyboard will switch off while the function keys stay lit.

More people will probably appreciate the way the keyboard looks, though. You can change the backlight to be pretty much any color you want, and you can set it to animate in ways that range from pretty (rainbow-wave effects that continuously change the keyboard’s color) to silly (a “ripple” effect that makes light radiate out from keys you press). The only problem is that the alternate characters and function key functions are unlit and printed in dark grey text on black keys, making them more difficult to see in the dark.

The trackpad isn’t one of Microsoft’s Precision Touchpads, but it doesn’t feel bad. Finger tracking, palm rejection, and two-finger scrolling all seem fine. The issue, from a productivity standpoint, is that it doesn’t support Windows 10’s new multi-finger trackpad gestures. We contacted Razer about this and were told that a driver update to enable that functionality would be coming “soon,” which ought to bring it up to the level of most other non-Precision Touchpad Ultrabooks.

Finally, the laptop’s stereo speakers are located on either side of the keyboard. Sound is above-average for laptop speakers, still tinny but with actually audible bass. They get loud enough to fill a room, but at high volumes they're prone to distortion—70 or 80 percent volume strikes a decent balance between volume and clarity. It'd be about as good as a cheap Bluetooth speaker at a party (though even a midrange portable speaker like my UE Mini Boom will have fuller sound).

Andrew Cunningham
Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue. Twitter@AndrewWrites